Download More ebooks [PDF]. Format PDF ebook download PDF KINDLE.

Full download ebooks at ebookmass.com

Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines: Our

Lifelong Relationship with Fungi 1st
Edition Money
For dowload this book click BUTTON or LINK below

https://ebookmass.com/product/molds-mushrooms-and-
medicines-our-lifelong-relationship-with-
fungi-1st-edition-money/
OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD NOW

Download More ebooks from https://ebookmass.com

More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Citizens' Ledger: Digitizing Our Money,

Democratizing Our Finance 1st Edition Robert C. Hockett

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-citizens-ledger-digitizing-our-
money-democratizing-our-finance-1st-edition-robert-c-hockett/

Edible mushrooms : chemical composition and nutritional

value 1st Edition Kala■

https://ebookmass.com/product/edible-mushrooms-chemical-
composition-and-nutritional-value-1st-edition-kalac/

Europe's Lifelong Learning Markets, Governance and

Policy: Using an Instruments Approach 1st ed. Edition
Marcella Milana

https://ebookmass.com/product/europes-lifelong-learning-markets-
governance-and-policy-using-an-instruments-approach-1st-ed-
edition-marcella-milana/

Nationalism in Internationalism: Ireland's Relationship

with the European Union Michael Holmes

https://ebookmass.com/product/nationalism-in-internationalism-
irelands-relationship-with-the-european-union-michael-holmes/
What Should I Do with My Money? Bryan Kuderna

https://ebookmass.com/product/what-should-i-do-with-my-money-
bryan-kuderna/

Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and

Adult Education: A Dialogue 1st ed. Edition Laura
Formenti

https://ebookmass.com/product/transforming-perspectives-in-
lifelong-learning-and-adult-education-a-dialogue-1st-ed-edition-
laura-formenti/

Our Love Affair with Drugs: The History, the Science,

the Politics 1st Edition Jerrold Winter

https://ebookmass.com/product/our-love-affair-with-drugs-the-
history-the-science-the-politics-1st-edition-jerrold-winter/

Current Developments in Biotechnology and

Bioengineering: Filamentous Fungi Biorefinery Mohammad
Taherzadeh

https://ebookmass.com/product/current-developments-in-
biotechnology-and-bioengineering-filamentous-fungi-biorefinery-
mohammad-taherzadeh/

South Korea’s Engagement with Africa: A History of the

Relationship in Multiple Aspects 1st ed. 2020 Edition
Yongkyu Chang

https://ebookmass.com/product/south-koreas-engagement-with-
africa-a-history-of-the-relationship-in-multiple-aspects-1st-
ed-2020-edition-yongkyu-chang/
Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines
 Molds, Mushrooms, and
Medicines
Our Lifelong Relationship with
Fungi

Nicholas P. Money

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD
Copyright © 2024 by Nicholas P. Money
Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual
property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge.
Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an
authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form,
please obtain permission.
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to
permissions@press.princeton.edu
Published by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Money, Nicholas P., author.
Title: Molds, mushrooms, and medicines : our lifelong relationship with fungi / Nicholas P. Money.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023030612 (print) | LCCN 2023030613 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691236308 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780691236315 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fungi. | Materia medica, Vegetable. | Molds (Fungi). | BISAC: SCIENCE / Life Sciences /
Mycology | NATURE / Plants / Mushrooms
Classification: LCC QK603 .M58 2024 (print) | LCC QK603 (ebook) | DDC 579.5—dc23/eng/20230908
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030612
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023030613
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Editorial: Alison Kalett, Hallie Schaeffer
Jacket: Heather Hansen
Production: Jacqueline Poirier
Publicity: Matthew Taylor (US), Kate Farquhar-Thomson (UK)
Copyeditor: Susan Campbell
Jacket Credit: Jacket images (clockwise): Nataliya Hora / Alamy Stock Photo; Eye of Science /
Science Source; BSIP SA / Alamy Stock Photo; Guido Blokker / Unsplash
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
1 Interacting: Encounters with Fungi from Birth to Death 1

Part I Inward

2 Touching: Fungi on the Skin 23

3 Breathing: Spores in the Lungs 40
4 Spreading: Opportunists in the Brain 57
5 Digestion: Yeasts in the Gut 73

Part II Outward

6 Nourishing: Molds and Mushrooms in Our Diets 93

7 Treating: Medicines from Fungi 110
8 Poisoning: Toxins in Mushrooms and Molds 125
9 Dreaming: Using Mushrooms to Treat Depression 142
10 Recycling: The Global Mycobiome 159

Appendix: Ghost Gut Fungi 175

Notes 179
List of Illustrations 225
Index 227
 Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE to thank my agent, Deborah Grosvenor, and my editor,

Alison Kalett, for making this book happen. Andor Kiss helped me to
untangle the studies on ghost gut fungi, Michael Klabunde assisted
with Latinisms, and my wife, Diana Davis, proofread the developing
manuscript.
 1
Interacting
ENCOUNTERS WITH FUNGI FROM BIRTH
TO DEATH

Sing, heavenly Muse …

 What in them is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of mushrooms to men.
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST (1667), BOOK I, LINES 6, 22–26, AMENDED

FUNGAL SPORES cast a shadow over my childhood and almost killed

me. One day in 1967, my five-year-old body began to run out of
oxygen as my lungs shut down with inflammation, turning my skin
blue before the ambulance arrived. I was born in the Thames Valley
of southern England, which is a lovely place unless you are an
asthmatic. Tree pollen and fungal spores fill the Oxfordshire air in
summer and turn paradise into hell. There had been a thunderstorm
that afternoon, which whipped clouds of these noxious particles into
the sky. They filtered into my chest with each breath, causing my
little airways to narrow and flood with mucus. A severe asthma attack
feels like death. The nurses put me in an oxygen tent and gave me
big orange tablets that were difficult to swallow, but after a day or
two these antibiotics combined with a steroidal medicine reopened
my lungs. More than fifty years later I can still see myself struggling
to breathe under that clear plastic canopy, and I wonder how much
this trauma led to my career as a mycologist and immersion in
research on the spores of the fungi that put me there.
The fact that a boy plagued by spores became a scientist who has
spent his adult life studying fungi, teaching students about their
biology, and serving as an expert witness in lawsuits related to mold
exposure is one of those serendipitous outcomes that define so many
lives. The connections between my childhood and my profession did
not occur to me until my brief experience as the patient of a
therapist. He was a gentle, bearded man who asked insightful
questions as he sought to help me understand why I was wrestling
with thanatophobia, or death anxiety, which was distracting me from
enjoying not being dead. Early in our conversations, I told him that I
was an expert on fungi, a mycologist, then explained a little about
what a fungus is and what a fungus does. We talked about many
other things—my health, marriage, and the challenges of parenting
teenagers—before he circled back one day and asked: “Have you
ever wondered why you are obsessed with death and with the
microbes that you have described as the great decomposers?” We
both laughed. It seems plausible that my asthma attacks were the
foundation of it all: thanatophobia and what some would view as a
morbid fascination with fungi that may have developed as a
subliminal attempt at therapy, like the hypochondriac who becomes a
doctor. On the other hand, maybe I just liked mushrooms.
What intrigues me now, and is the subject of this book, is the
science of the human-fungus symbiosis, both the intimate and the
extended relationship between fungi and our species. This
relationship runs all the way from yeasts that grow on the skin and
inside the gut to our uses of fungi as food and sources of medicines
and, ultimately, to the mushroom colonies in soil that make life on
land possible. Our closest physical ties with the fungi are invisible
because the ones that live on the body are microscopic. These
species grow amid the more numerous bacteria and viruses and are
critical players in human health. Together, these microbes form the
human microbiome, and we identify the fungal part of this intimate
ecosystem as the mycobiome. (The prefix, myco-, from the Greek
mykes, refers to all things fungal.)
The growth of immense numbers of fungi on the skin and inside
the body is an unexpected and startling fact of science. Fungi are a
vital part of the immense ecosystem of the human body, which
operates as a partnership between trillions of human and microbial
cells. We cannot live without these fungi. Touch the creased skin
behind one of your ears or run your hands through your hair. You will
not see them, of course, but fungal cells will cling to your fingertips
afterward and every other time you rub, scratch, pick, or caress.
They are essential partners, lodgers on all of us. Most of the fungi of
the mycobiome are helpful, but some can turn on us when our
immune defenses are weakened and cause terrifically damaging
infections. Fungi that normally grow on plants, rotting wood, compost
heaps, and bird droppings can also settle on the body and attack our
tissues if we are vulnerable. Human diseases caused by fungi are
called mycoses, and these range from the irritation of athlete’s foot to
life-threatening brain infections.
But our relationship with fungi does not end with the species found
on the body. It widens to our conscious interactions with these
microbes through their roles in our diet and as a source of powerful
medicines. Science has been advancing in all of these areas of
mycological inquiry, from studies that reveal the diversity of yeasts
that grow on the skin to research on the use of psychedelic
mushrooms in the treatment of depression. Once we expand our view
of the give-and-take between humans and fungi to these deliberate
uses of fungi, we discover a broader relationship, a human-fungus
symbiosis that is a defining feature of our biology and culture. The
term “symbiosis” is used in its original and most liberal sense in this
book to describe helpful and harmful relationships between species.
This is a perfect reflection of the incredible range of interactions
between humans and fungi.

WHAT IS A FUNGUS?
Not plant, not animal, more animal than plant, and treated as the
most mysterious kingdom of life in popular culture, fungi come in
many shapes and sizes.1 The fungi we see most often seem too big
to be categorized as microbes. These are mushrooms, which include
the fairy-tale fly agaric, with its red cap spotted with white scales;
shelf fungi, as big as dinner plates, that grow on decomposing logs;
and slices of white button mushrooms on pizzas. The reason we call
these species microorganisms is that the fungus that forms the
mushroom is microscopic. For almost all of their lives, these
organisms exist as spidery colonies of tiny threads called hyphae.
Each thread, or hypha, is ten times thinner than a human hair. These
filaments elongate and branch as they feed in soil and go about the
process of rotting wood. The colony of branching hyphae is a
mycelium. When this mycelium has grown over a large area and
absorbed enough food, it reverses direction and flows to the surface,
where the threads merge to form mushrooms. Mushrooms with gills
are the fruit bodies or sex organs of fungi that mist the air with
spores. As the urge to reproduce becomes an imperative, the fungus
moves from belowground to aboveground, changing its role from
feeding to fruiting in the wondrous cycle of its life.
But most fungi never form a mushroom and are microscopic
throughout their feeding and reproductive stages. These include
aquatic fungi that swim in ponds, with tailed cells that resemble
animal sperm; molds with stalks hung with sparkling spores that look
like miniature chandeliers; and 1,500 species of yeasts. Yeasts
include the species used in brewing and baking, whose Latin name is
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and another fungus, called Candida
albicans, that lives on everyone and is best known, unfortunately, for
its irritating nature as the vaginal yeast.2 (Latin names are kept to a
bare minimum in this book, but some of the fungi are best known
through their Latin names, and others are so obscure that they have
never been given a common name.) Unlike fungi that grow as thin
threads, which we call molds, yeasts develop as single rounded cells
and produce buds, or daughter cells, on their surface.

MAKING SENSE OF THE MYCOBIOME

The entire human body is affected by fungi. Yeasts populate the skin
and crowd around the hair follicles on the scalp; other species live in
the ear canals, nasal passages, and mouth; and fungi swarm in the
digestive and reproductive systems. The fungi are as small as the
cells of our tissues and only become visible when they grow in such
profusion that they form patches and pastes on the surface of the
skin. But at this moment, and throughout our lives, fungal cells are
feeding on the scalp and growing in the gut, consuming the mucus
and dead cells that we discharge every day, and helping to control
the bacteria. This microbial community is in constant flux—and so
much of it was completely unknown until recently.
 Fungi have been sidelined at meetings of microbiologists by
studies on bacteria and viruses during my career and have been an
afterthought in medicine. Earlier generations of mycologists
misunderstood the fungi that they found on the body, regarding most
of them as germs that damaged hospital patients and overlooking the
significance of the yeasts growing peacefully on everyone else. Even
when molecular genetic techniques began to reveal the incredible
diversity and number of microbes in the gut, the fungi were missed
because the methods were limited to identifying the DNA sequences
of bacteria. This picture is changing at last, and new investigative
methods are exposing the yeasts and molds—the blobs and filaments
—multiplying from scalp to toes on the outside of the body and from
mouth to anus on the inside. As this examination of the fungi has
proceeded, the vision of the microbiome as a mostly bacterial
territory has shifted to an appreciation of the diverse communities of
fungi that fight and cooperate with bacteria through webs of chemical
interactions to make a living on the body.3 Through these innovations
we are beginning to fathom the extraordinary influence of the
mycobiome on our health and well-being.
Even with this knowledge, the invisibility of the human mycobiome
makes it difficult to comprehend. This is life-changing science in the
sense that it permits a new view of the body, but it takes some
imagination too. There is nothing cellular and microbiological about
the way we look and feel. We picture ourselves as semisolid
individuals, singular beings constructed with varying degrees of
smoothness and raggedness, pert here, drooping there, and hanging
together across the decades, but this half-truth belies our biological
nature. For a more enlightened sense of self, we have to close our
eyes to picture the body as a galaxy of cells, to say, and to believe, “I
am a trinity, born from one cell, copied in trillions, and filled with
other forms of life.”
Microbes that grow naturally on the body belong to the healthy
microbiome. Different microbes populate different locations on the
body, including the skin, ear canals, nasal passages, lungs, teeth,
digestive tract, and reproductive system. In each place, the body
supports intermingled communities of bacteria, viruses, and fungi
that form the bacteriome, virome, and mycobiome. The term
mycobiome was used first to describe the fungi associated with plants
in a salt marsh on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and now applies to
the communities of fungi found in any location.4 For example,
cultivated pineapples harbor forty-nine species of fungi, tropical
corals host a jumble of marine fungi, and the gut of the largest living
lemur, called the indri, is heaving with microbes acquired from its
vegan diet and supplemented with fungi from the soil.5 Every animal,
plant, and seaweed is crawling with fungi.
We see hints of the ancestral human mycobiome in monkeys and
other apes, whose gut fungi vary among species.6 The community of
fungi that is distinctively human has been remodeled from earlier
mixtures of the fungi that grew on our hominid ancestors. This has
involved losses and replacements of fungi as the mycobiome has
adapted to changes in our diet and behavior. These evolutionary
modifications have unfolded over the course of millions of years, but
fungi have also come and gone on much shorter historical timescales.
The communities of fungi on the body were rejiggered when we
emigrated from our birthplace in Africa to other climatic zones and
began fabricating clothing and footwear. Clothes and shoes affected
the fungi on the skin, and the gut fungi were modified as we
exchanged hunting and gathering for life in agricultural settlements.

WHAT THE FUNGI ARE DOING ON THE BODY

Fungi grow on humans because fungi grow everywhere they find
food, and we are stuffed with energy. A pound of flesh has the same
number of calories as a pound of ice cream, for an average of more
than one hundred thousand calories per body.7 Colonies of yeasts
consume a snippet of this when they digest the natural oils on the
scalp. Other fungi live by breaking down bacteria and food particles
as they are squeezed along the 1.5-meter-long tube of the colon. We
are the unconscious hosts of a 24/7 buffet.
 Although we are unaware of these fungi unless they cause
inflammation and tissue damage, the immune system is policing them
throughout the day. This defense mechanism is a marvel of natural
engineering. White blood cells are the biggest players in immunology.
These colorless cells flow in the blood alongside the more plentiful
red blood cells. Red blood cells outnumber white blood cells by six
hundred to one, and all of these red blood cells do exactly the same
thing: they pick up oxygen from the fresh air entering the lungs when
we inhale and carry it around the body; on the return path, the red
blood cells release the carbon dioxide that we exhale. White blood
cells have nothing to do with this import and export of gases and are
more diverse in their roles. Following their own genetic programming,
white blood cells called phagocytes move around the body, stretching
themselves forward and retracting behind, just like amoebas that live
in soil and water. Some of them spread from the bloodstream into the
surrounding tissues and crawl into the linings of the lungs and the
outer layers of the skin. Wherever they encounter microorganisms,
they decide whether to kill them or give them a pass. White blood
cells also rid the body of human cells that are damaged or start to
grow in a way that can lead to the development of tumors. We would
not last for very long at all without these defenders of the immune
system.
The immune system manages the whole ecosystem of human
tissues and embedded microorganisms. It allows specialized fungi to
feed on the dead cells on the skin surface and the fatty secretions on
the scalp and other fungi to multiply in the mucus linings of the
digestive and respiratory systems. Turning to its more aggressive
role, the immune system works continuously to eliminate insurgents,
including the fungal pathogens that threaten to choke the whole
enterprise. The resulting mixtures of fungi that live on an individual
body are unique.8 The types of fungi differ in each location, and their
numbers change as some grow and reproduce and others deteriorate
and die. Our age and gender affect the numbers and kinds of
microbes on the body too, and there is some evidence that hormonal
differences between the sexes may stimulate the growth of distinctive
groups of fungi. Sweating stimulates the skin residents to proliferate,
sun exposure kills others; gardeners pick up fungi from the soil and
from plants; children transfer fungi to their parents and vice versa;
and lovers swap fungi in bed. The number and identity of the spores
flowing through the nose and into the lungs vary as we breathe, and
the fungi in the mouth and digestive system are agitated with each
meal.
Geography is another variable, because fungi are not distributed
evenly across the planet. This means that there is a regional
character to the mycobiome, with people in Africa partnering with
different fungi than Asian populations. Diet has a dominating effect
on the kinds of fungi and their abundance in the gut, with major
differences between vegetarians, meat eaters, and consumers of lots
of processed foods.9 Many illnesses affect the types and abundance
of fungi, especially those in the gut, and traumatic injuries including
severe skin burns enable fungi to penetrate deep into our tissues.
The catalog of these sundry influences on the composition of the
fungal communities on the body is endless.
The significance of human-fungal interactions is surprising, at first,
when we consider the scarcity of the fungi compared with the
bacteria in the microbiome. There are only 40 billion fungal cells in
the human gut, compared with 40 trillion bacterial cells, a thousand
bacteria to each fungus.10 Heaped together, the bacteria weigh as
much as a cup of sugar, and spread in a single line, they would
encircle Earth. The less numerous but far larger fungal cells weigh no
more than a raisin, but their combined surface area is impressive—
equivalent to an eight-person dining table. The interior lining of the
large intestine covers a similar area, and even though many of the
fungi are buried in the dissolving food and developing feces, these
calculations reveal that the fungi offer a lot of real estate for chemical
interactions with the body. The molecule-by-molecule transactions
between the immense surface presented by the fungi and the
immune system go a long way toward explaining how such tiny
organisms can have such a profound effect on our health.
The impact of the fungi on the health of the gut is a controversial
subject among microbiome experts. Some view the fungi as critical
players in the internal ecosystem, while others believe that their
activities are eclipsed by the overwhelming number of bacteria.11
These differing viewpoints have arisen because the science of the
mycobiome is moving at lightning speed, and conclusions about the
influence of the fungi on some health conditions swerve from study
to study. But the truth is unfolding, and this book will share
consensus views when they are available and highlight other areas of
mycobiome research where we remain puzzled.
Uncertainties come from many sources. The first and most
formidable of these is the question of cause versus effect.12 If we find
differences in the abundance of fungi in people suffering from a
particular illness, it can be very difficult to determine whether the
fungi are responsible for the illness or whether the change in their
number is a consequence of another issue with the patient’s health.
Either way, treating the fungus may be effective at alleviating some
of the most distressing symptoms of the complaint. Examples of
these conditions that do not seem to be caused by fungi but are
associated with shifts in the onboard populations of fungi are
explored in the chapters that follow. The second diagnostic problem
comes from the awesome power of the modern genetic techniques
that allow us to detect the dead cells of fungi that are passing
through the intestine and may have entered the body in our food.
This makes it difficult to identify the living species that are long-term
residents in the gut, which are more important in the health of the
digestive system than the remains of dietary migrants.
While the relevance of the fungi in understanding some aspects of
healthy gut function is debatable, a substantial body of research has
proven that fungi belong to communities of microorganisms in other
parts of the body where they are crucial in health and disease. There
is no question about the importance of the fungi on the body surface,
where they support skin health and can also cause allergic responses
and unsightly infections. Similarly, we know that fungal spores are
powerful triggers of asthma and other allergic illnesses in the
respiratory system. Lastly, it is important to recognize the connections
between the mycobiome in different parts of the body. The effects of
the gut fungi on the immune system can influence the development
of health conditions elsewhere, and fungi can also move physically
from one location to another—from skin to gut and vice versa. With
so much attention to the effects of fungi on human health, this is the
perfect time to explore this phenomenal symbiosis.

WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

Everyone is damaged by fungi at some time in their lives. Hundreds
of millions of people suffer from allergies caused by fungal spores,
and fungal infections range from skin irritation and toenail
disintegration to the foulest flesh-melting diseases ever pictured in a
pathology textbook. The World Health Organization (WHO) prioritized
the surveillance of serious fungal infections in 2022 with the
publication of a list of nineteen species that pose the greatest threat
to public health.13 This was in response to the rising numbers of
fungal infections and difficulties in diagnosing and treating these
serious illnesses. Mycoses kill 1.5 million people every year, and the
threat of the severest infections is growing with the emergence of
strains of yeasts that are resistant to antifungal medicines. The
burden of these illnesses is heightened in the developing world,
where access to adequate medical care is limited, and in more
affluent countries with aging populations that are more vulnerable to
infection. Poisoning is another hazard of our relationship with the
fungi, resulting from the mistaken identification of wild mushrooms
by foragers and by consuming the toxins produced by molds that
grow on harvested grain. These harmful interactions complete the
picture of our relationship with the fungi, which runs from beauty to
the beast, the yin and the yang of the human-fungus symbiosis.
 It is easy to disregard the fungi that support our health because
they are invisible, and we can live in blissful ignorance of the dark
side of mycology if we are fortunate to avoid infections. But wisdom
comes from familiarity with this subject. The types of fungi that live
on the body and their levels of activity vary according to where we
live, what we eat, and whether we work indoors or outdoors.
Changes in our health, drugs that we are prescribed, and the use of
consumer products including toothpaste, shampoos, and body lotions
modify our closest relationship with fungi too. No amount of
grooming will leave us unfungal, which is a good thing because we
would be in bad shape if we abolished our partners. A body without
fungi would be as barren as a forest without mushrooms. Equipped
with this self-knowledge, we can seek opportunities for correcting
imbalances in this intimate relationship.

BEYOND THE BODY: THE EXTENDED SYMBIOSIS

Beyond the body, fungi inhabit our pets, are active in damp places in
our homes, and flourish on fruits and vegetables in the kitchen. Pet
dogs and cats are covered with yeasts, bathrooms are mycological
playgrounds, and we consume fungi clinging to salad ingredients
without giving them a thought—until the tomatoes sprout hairs.
Physical contact with these fungi is certain, continuous, and
consequential. There is a historical character to these passive
interactions with the fungi in the environment, which has changed
over thousands of years and continues to shift in the modern world.
The transition from hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles to
agricultural settlements around ten thousand years ago had a
profound effect on our interactions with fungi, by exposing us to
masses of fungal spores emanating from moldy grain stores and to
toxins in food made from these spoiled cereals. Asthma and other
allergies to fungal spores were born from changes in farming over the
millennia, and the crowding of populations in cities promoted the
spread of skin infections by ringworm fungi. The human-fungus
relationship has also operated on a more conscious level with the
incorporation of fungi into our diet, from foraging for wild mushrooms
and cultivating an increasing selection of species, to the growing
popularity of nuggets of fungal protein or mycoprotein manufactured
in bioreactors. The uses of fungi for food have also multiplied through
cheesemaking, leavening bread, brewing beer, and making wine. By
domesticating the fungi that enrich our diet, we have folded the
natural environmental actions of these microbes into human culture
and driven changes in civilization over thousands of years. All of the
uses of the microscopic yeasts and molds for food are extensions of
the human-fungus symbiosis.
Human interactions with fungi reach further through the
biotechnological manipulation of fungi in drug manufacture. Fungal
medicines include antibiotics to treat bacterial infections; cyclosporin,
which prevents the rejection of transplanted organs; and “human”
insulin and vaccines produced by genetically modified yeast. On the
subject of fungal medicines, there is a lucrative global market for
medicinal mushrooms with reputed life-enhancing and lifesaving
benefits. Consumers spend tens of billions of dollars per year on
mushroom extracts in the belief that they are effective at treating
illnesses through their effects on the immune system. Few of the
claims made by marketers have been tested, yet there is some
hopeful news on this front with investments in clinical trials on
mushroom products as anticancer agents. Drawing on stronger
scientific evidence, “magic” mushrooms have outgrown their
countercultural associations to be embraced as a promising treatment
for clinical depression and post-traumatic stress. Through these
ancient and modern cultural practices, we have amplified the positive
influence of the fungi on our lives.

FROM WOMB TO TOMB: THE FUNGUS IS WITH YOU

Some years ago, when I gave seminars on the so-called toxic molds
found in buildings, I would say, “We inhale their spores from first
breath to last gasp.” This was true, but more recent findings show
that the phrase provides an incomplete picture of our interactions
with fungi, which begin before birth and extend into the grave. The
bookends must be extended because the fungi are with us from
womb to tomb.
The view of the womb as a perfectly sterile incubator for the fetus
has been consigned to medical history today.14 Our interaction with
bacteria and fungi before birth is evident from genetic analysis of the
meconium, which is the tarry liquid expelled by the newborn that
develops in the fetal bowel. It is the initial deposit that comes to light
in the first few days after birth and presages a lifetime per capita
unloading of twelve tons of feces. Fungi that live within the mother’s
vagina, particularly the Candida yeasts, are the commonest species
detected in the meconium, which suggests that they colonize the
amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus and make their way into the
gut of the baby when it swallows a little of the fluid before birth.15
Whether the traces of fungi found in the meconium affect the
developing fetus is unclear, although we do know that the risk of
premature birth increases as the number of microbes within the
amniotic sac rises.16 Fungi may also spread all the way from the
mother’s skin to the fetus through her bloodstream. Microbes are
normally excluded from the blood, but when the tissue barriers are
weakened, and leakage occurs, the bloodstream becomes a
distribution system for bacteria and fungi. Inflammation of the gums
or gingivitis, which develops into more serious forms of gum disease,
or periodontitis, is one way that this can happen, raising the
importance of oral hygiene and dental care for pregnant mothers.
Birth propels the baby into the microbial world, where it will be
coated with fungi, filled with bacteria, infected by viruses, and
breathe air brimming with all manner of irritating particles. As a fetus
we receive sips of foreign proteins through the placenta and
encounter the tiny populations of microbes in the amniotic fluid.
Outside the womb we are deluged with microbes. Natural selection
shaped Earth as a jungle of hospitable and hostile microbes over
billions of years and each of us is forced to adjust to this carnival.
The only possibility for survival resides with our guardian angel—the
immune system—which allows us to explore this melee safely,
cultivating microbes on the body that keep us healthy and warding
off the germs that are more likely to kill us.
The deeper relationship with the microscopic starts after birth and
depends on how we are born. If we surface via the natural route, the
rupture of the amniotic sac leaves us squeezing through the vagina,
where we receive a coating of bacteria and fungi from our mothers.
The elastic fit of the birth canal around the baby ensures that the
whole surface of the newborn receives this treatment. This is why the
same strains of Candida yeast that grow in the mother’s vagina are
found on the skin of infants born in this manner. Babies born by C-
section become colonized by Candida from their mothers too, but by
different strains of the yeasts that are more abundant on the surface
of the mother’s skin. Difficulties in identifying fungal species make
these studies challenging, but the overall pattern of vaginal microbes
for vaginal deliveries and skin microbes for the C-section babies
seems to be true. Our birthday is the first day of intensive schooling
for the immune system that has been preparing for a microbiological
hurricane for nine months.
Fungi are also conveyed through intimate contact with the mother
and handling by others after delivery, and breastfeeding furnishes the
infant with a different mix of species. According to recent
experiments that took precautions to avoid contamination from the
nipple surface, there are a lot of fungi in breastmilk. These studies
show that a slurping infant absorbs more than two hundred million
fungal cells a day, along with a similar number of bacteria.17 The
majority of the fungi are yeasts, although there are traces of molds
whose spores drift in from the air. It seems likely that fungi found in
the milk get there through the bloodstream, like the ones that cross
the placenta. Cells in the immune system may also pick up fungi from
the nasal passages, lungs, and gut and carry them to the breast
tissue where they are released into the milk. The couriers that
perform this proposed role are the dendritic cells that prowl the body
looking for microorganisms.
 The transmission of microorganisms from mothers to their
offspring is a widespread phenomenon in nature.18 The ubiquity of
this seemingly deliberate donation of foreign organisms from mother
to child suggests that some of them are critical for the vitality of the
newborns of all animals. Most of these microbes appear to be
beneficial, although some pathogens can also be relayed in this
manner. Harmful microbes that pass from the human mother to child
include the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, the syphilis
bacterium, and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The fact
that some pathogens take advantage of this intimacy is an inevitable
drawback to the elementary processes that support the next
generation. Natural selection has fostered microbe transfer because
the advantages of readying the immune system for the outside world
outweigh the disadvantages. The proof is evident in the success of
the human reproductive mechanism and the fact that most infants do
not succumb to microbial infection. Evolution is blind to a small
proportion of casualties.
The split personality of the fungi as beauty and beast is exactly
what we would predict from nature. The idea of some grand harmony
among organisms is pure fantasy. Like every other scrap of life, fungi
are engaged in a continuous struggle for existence. They collaborate
with other organisms when there is mutual benefit, fight when their
partners act too aggressively, and set up shop elsewhere by
dispersing spores. Others have no time for collaboration and live by
damaging host tissues from the moment they arrive. When we think
about the beneficial fungi on the body and inside the gut, there is a
tendency to ascribe intention to the relationship. This is wishful
thinking. The fungi that grow on us fulfill a role that they have
crafted, occupying a niche on the body—the scalp for example—
where no other microbes do it better. During their evolutionary
history, these fungi have developed the mechanisms for living on the
dryness of the head, feeding on fats, and keeping the bacteria in
check. As long as they do not irritate the skin, they are left in peace.
When the environment between the hairs becomes unbalanced in
some way, the fungi get unruly, and accumulate in unusual numbers.
This causes the skin to flake, and the immune system is alerted that
something is amiss. Swings and roundabouts, day in and day out, ups
and downs, and the same goes for the digestive system, vagina, and
everywhere else that the fungi blossom on the body.
Fungi that adapt themselves to living in these different locations in
the human ecosystem are the ones that need to be recognized as
partners by the immune system and left alone. Much about this
process of acceptance remains unknown, but the immune system of
the baby seems to be tutored inside the uterus, during birth, and via
breastfeeding, priming the newborn for a lifetime of encounters with
microbes. Learning to work with some of the commonest kinds of
fungi on the skin seems like a very good lesson. By acknowledging
these harmless species and avoiding conflict, their growth may limit
the ability of bacteria to coat the skin. We know that yeasts engage
in chemical warfare with bacteria, and as long as these fungi do not
proliferate to the point of becoming a nuisance themselves, they
remain part of the healthy microbiome.
The newborn immune system is very fragile, with a small
population of mobile cells to police the lungs and other tissues, but
the number of these caretaker cells skyrockets to adult levels within
the first days of life. This period of vulnerability to infection is one of
the characteristics of infants that resulted in such a high level of
historical mortality. Before the twentieth century, more than 25
percent of babies died in the first year of life, and half of all children
died before they reached the end of puberty. Oral Candida infections,
or thrush, which spread to other parts of the body were a significant
cause of infant deaths.19 A combination of better nutrition and
hygiene, and the development of vaccines, antibiotics, and other
drugs in the twentieth century transformed this picture, and today’s
infant mortality rates range from 5 percent in some African countries
to less than 1 percent in Europe.
Considering these statistics, it is difficult to find fault with modern
medical practices, but we have introduced new hazards by increasing
the number of births by C-section and avoiding breastfeeding.20
Breastfeeding follows a disturbing pattern, with few countries
meeting the WHO and UNICEF targets for infants.21 These regional
differences are affected by ethnicity and culture as much as economic
prosperity. They are alarming from a mycological perspective because
the use of milk formula is linked to a greater risk of asthma and other
allergies to fungi. The immune system needs to be introduced to
grubbiness of the natural world from the get-go, and if this lesson
fails, we may face a lifetime of struggle, responding to each fleck of
fungus as if we are under attack. There is some evidence that this
poor formatting of the immune system in childhood can also lead to
autoimmune diseases later in life.22
The drama of the mycobiome does not end with infancy, and our
interactions with fungi change as the years pass. The mycobiome in
the digestive system is adjusted in response to the shift to solid food
and later as we pursue more omnivorous, carnivorous, or vegetarian
diets. The mycobiome is modified in adulthood, wobbling this way
and that as we gain and lose weight, become pregnant, undergo
cosmetic surgery and dental procedures, take antibiotics, are injured,
and develop short-term (acute) or long-term (chronic) illnesses. We
can pick up fungal infections at any time, although the likelihood of
developing these mycoses increases among the elderly. Fungal
infections increase with age as we develop illnesses that damage the
immune system or require us to undergo therapies that lower these
defenses to maintain transplanted organs or to treat cancer.
Moving to the tomb, we are the latest additions to the menu of
meat dishes available to fungi that have been in the recycling
business for hundreds of millions of years. Bacteria take care of a lot
of the soft tissues in the human cadaver, leaving the keratin protein
in hair and nails for a variety of specialized molds.23 Bones are
infiltrated by fungal hyphae too, assisting their disintegration. These
are the slowest processes of decomposition, but the disappearance of
the hair, nails, hooves, horns, and antlers of dead animals in nature
demonstrates the power of the fungi. We are sustained by this
planetary-scale nutrient cycling, together with the breakdown of plant
debris, because we rely on the forests, grasslands, and agricultural
ecosystems fertilized by the fungi. We would not be here without
them. Mycorrhizal partnerships with living plants are another
essential part of this broader relationship. We need fungi to work
with plants as much as we need fungi to work with our bodies.

THE PAGES AHEAD

In the chapters that follow, we will explore the communities of fungi
that live in every place on the body, pursue the historical and
contemporary uses of fungi as food and medicine, and look at the
ecological roles of the fungi beyond the body that function as an
invisible life-support system. This book is a revelation of the human
relationship with the fungi, the human-fungus symbiosis, from the
fungi growing around the roots of our hairs to the colonies of
mushrooms wrapped around the roots of forest trees. The chapters
are organized into two sections that speak to the direction of the
inquiry: part I, “Inward,” and part II, “Outward.”
Part I, Inward. Starting with the fungi on the skin surface (chapter
2), we slip inside the body with the spores that enter the lungs
(chapter 3), and dive deeper with the yeasts and filaments that infect
our internal organs (chapter 4). All tissues in the body can become
colonized by fungi, which expands the activities of the restless
mycobiome to the lungs, liver, kidneys, brain, and gut. Fungi in the
gut are also part of the healthy digestive system, until this part of the
mycobiome is disrupted and a whole range of illnesses related to
immune dysfunction develop (chapter 5).
Part II, Outward. In the second set of chapters, we look at our
interactions with fungi that grow outside the body, beginning with
their importance in our diet, both as wild and cultivated mushrooms,
and in the development of mycoprotein meat substitutes that are
energizing the food industry (chapter 6). This concept of the
extended symbiosis incorporates the modern use of drugs produced
by genetically modified fungi in conventional medicine and the
controversial marketing of mushroom extracts in alternative or
naturopathic medicine (chapter 7). From medicines we move to
poisons and the dangers of consuming the wrong mushrooms and
the spoilage of grains by molds that produce mycotoxins (chapter 8).
Magic mushrooms and their use in the treatment of clinical
depression and other serious mental health issues follows (chapter
9). Proposed links between the use of magic mushrooms and the
origins of Christianity and other religions have been dismissed by
theologists, but there is room to reconcile these viewpoints with a
fresh and objective analysis of the evidence. In the final chapter we
examine the ultimate extension of the human relationship with the
fungi through our dependence on their wider ecological roles
(chapter 10). We discover the body as an ecosystem flavored with
fungi—a pulsing city or mycopolis—dependent on the fungi that
support plants, create soil, filter rainwater, and spin the carbon cycle.
This is the story of people and fungi, the human-fungus symbiosis
that spans the local to the global, revealing how our lives are
influenced through rich relationships with these extraordinary
microorganisms.
PART I

Inward
 2
Touching
FUNGI ON THE SKIN
ALTHOUGH WE MAY be exposed to fungi in the womb, the coating of
yeasts that forms when we are born marks the real beginning of the
lifelong human-fungus symbiosis. Fungi enter the lungs and the
digestive system as soon as we start breathing and breast- or bottle-
feeding, but the skin remains the biggest territory for the fungi
throughout life, the place where they dominate our microbiology. The
skin is considered the largest human organ, and the fungi grow all
over it, consuming natural oils and dead cells, supporting and
irritating the folds and furrows of the external tissue or epithelium.
They grow in the greatest numbers on the scalp, where one hundred
thousand to one million yeasts can huddle in the space of a postage
stamp.1 If humans were squeezed together at this density, all eight
billion of us would fit into a city the size of Los Angeles.2 When we
look in the mirror and brush our hair, we have no sense of this
congestion, but the fungi are in full swing, stirring the chemistry of
the skin, bossing the tinier bacterial residents around, and causing
the tissues to redden and flake when their routines are disturbed by a
new soap, shampoo, or lotion.
Most of our modesty can be concealed with a bath towel, but the
skin surface available for microbial growth is more extensive,
matching the area of thirty towels if we perform the thought
experiment of flattening out the nooks and crannies of the five million
hair follicles.3 The populations of fungi on this landscape are adjusted
from birth to death, with yeasts and filamentous species coming and
going according to rules that we are only beginning to understand.
The numbers and kinds of fungi that grow from head to toes have
also changed throughout history as we have wrapped ourselves with
clothes, slipped on shoes, and doctored the environment with
cosmetics and drug treatments. Going back even farther, the skin
mycobiome has been making and remaking itself since modern
humans emerged from the Rift Valley of Africa.
The skin is not the most inviting place for microorganisms,
because food and water can be scarce. These challenges have led
fungi that live on the scalp to specialize in feeding on the waxy
sebum secreted from sebaceous glands and others to become very
good at breaking down the keratin protein in the outermost layers of
the skin. Perspiration provides salty water, and some of the residents
overcome the aridity by producing their own water as they digest the
fats in the sebum. Through these measures, yeasts and molds
luxuriate on the skin. There are even more bacteria on the surface of
the body, but this is where the dimensions of the fungal cells become
pivotal. Although there are ten bacteria for every fungus on the skin,
the fungi outweigh the bacteria by a factor of ten.4 This difference in
size explains why the fungi are so important to the ecology of the
skin. Fungi also abound in the gut, as we will see in chapter 5, but
they do not fare quite as well as the bacteria. One of the reasons for
this is that fungi like to be flushed with oxygen, which is quite limited
in the intestines. Many of the gut bacteria are more flexible in their
oxygen requirements, which explains their growth in the trillions.5
Understanding what fungi do on the skin surface is a work in
progress for experts on the microbiology of the skin, with more
questions than answers, and a lot of conflicting information about the
identity of the fungi that support the clearest complexions, most
luxurious hair, and healthiest nails. The importance of quite subtle
changes in the skin mycobiome is illustrated by a complaint known as
sensitive skin syndrome. This skin condition is very common,
affecting more than half of all people, if we include very mild cases.
Symptoms are subjective, making it difficult to diagnose, and include
stinging, burning, and tingling sensations that follow the use of
cosmetics and exposure to everyday irritants. There are no visible
signs of sensitive skin in most patients, but when reddened patches
appear we call this erythema. The mycobiome was implicated in
sensitive skin in a study from South Korea that found a greater
diversity of fungi in skin swabs taken from women with the syndrome
relative to control subjects.6 Malassezia yeasts were the most
frequent fungi swabbed from the cheeks of all the women, but in the
patients with sensitive skin, this yeast was diluted by a surge in the
growth of other kinds of fungi, including a mold called Mucor. The
mycobiome differed from case to case, with little uniformity between
the communities of fungi that developed. Fungal involvement in the
chronic skin inflammation in sufferers of psoriasis follows the same
pattern as sensitive skin syndrome, with a greater diversity of fungal
species found in the patches of damaged skin compared with the
intervening areas of healthy skin.7
This research shows that these skin conditions are associated with
disruptions to the normal mycobiome. Dysbiosis is the term used to
describe instances of microbial disturbance, whether they are
associated with disease or not. Turbulent mycobiomes and
microbiomes more generally are part of the normal pandemonium of
nature, which makes it doubly difficult to determine when the
appearance of an unusual fungus means that something is amiss.
Although skin inflammation can be a direct response to the growth of
a particular fungal species, we do not refer to complaints like
sensitive skin syndrome as infections. Diagnosis of a fungal infection,
or mycosis, requires a greater level of tissue damage, but we are
dealing with a continuum of symptoms associated with fungi on the
skin rather than a clear distinction between an unsettled mycobiome
and more problematic disease.
At both ends of the spectrum of fungal development on the skin,
the behavior of the mycobiome is affected by the response of the
immune system. The immune system has a definite role in shaping
the mycobiome, by permitting some fungi to grow and eradicating
others. For its part, the mycobiome trains the immune system to
recognize harmless and harmful adjustments in numbers and species.
When we look at the most serious mycoses, we often find that they
develop after damage to the immune defenses. Infections of our
internal organs are featured in later chapters, but the mycoses of the
skin arise from our continuous interactions with fungi in the
environment and happen to people with perfectly healthy immune
systems.

RINGWORM, ROBERT REMAK, AND RADIATION

Greek and Roman physicians were familiar with ringworm, which they
lumped together with other scalp conditions and called porrigo.8
Public bathing in ancient Greece and Rome and the practice of
pouring olive oil onto the skin and removing it with a curved blade or
strigil was a surefire remedy against skin parasites.9 But the oiled skin
was an invitation for the growth of fungi, and ringworm was a
common complaint in Rome. The first emperor, Caesar Augustus, was
blemished with “a number of hard dry patches resembling ringworm,
caused by vigorous use of the scraper on an itching skin,” and the
affliction may have factored in the suicide of Roman senator Festus,
who was desperately ashamed by “the deformity of a Ringworme in
his face.”10
Ringworm is a general term for fungal infections that can take hold
on any area of the skin. Early references to “rynge-worme” appear in
the 1400s, and toward the end of the seventeenth century John
Aubrey, the writer and pioneering archaeologist, noted the
resemblance of the skin lesions to the fairy rings produced by
mushrooms in his Natural History of Wiltshire: “As to the green circles
on the downes, vulgarly called faiery circles (dances), I presume they
are generated from the breathing out of a fertile subterraneous
vapour. (The ring-worme on a man’s flesh is circular. Excogitate a
paralolisme between the cordial heat and ye subterranean heat, to
elucidate this phenomenon.)”11 In other words, if we believe that fairy
rings arise from the release of poisonous fumes from the earth, we
might get at the root cause of ringworm by examining the humors of
blood (air), phlegm (water), black bile (earth), and yellow bile (fire),
on which the medicine of Aubrey’s day depended. This kind of
deductive logic is the reason that Aristotle is such a poor guide to the
workings of nature, although a few classical scholars may disagree
with this brusque assessment. In any case, while Aubrey’s
observations did not lead to any treatments for ringworm, he was
spot-on about the similarities between fairy rings and the skin
disease. In both cases, the hyphae of filamentous fungi start growing
from single spores, striking outward in all directions at once to
produce circular colonies.
More intentional investigations on disease-causing or pathogenic
fungi began in the nineteenth century. Richard Owen, the famous
anatomist, stirred interest in fungal infections when he discovered “a
green vegetable mould or mucor” in the lungs of a flamingo during
the dissection of a bird that had died in the London Zoo.12 Owen
concluded that the fungus was a parasite that had been growing in
the bird before its death. His study was one of a scattering of early
descriptions of the mycosis called aspergillosis, which also occurs in
humans, but the first proof that a fungus was responsible for human
disease came from research on ringworm. In 1842, twenty-seven-
year-old medical researcher Robert Remak conducted a remarkable
and unpleasant experiment by lifting a scab from the scalp of a
patient suffering from ringworm and taping it to his own forearm.13
After two weeks, he noticed “a strong itching … [and] found a dark
red spot the size of a vest button” at the inoculation site. Removing
the crusty spot, he found the fungus embedded in his skin, proving
that it was responsible for ringworm.
Remak’s exploration of ringworm belongs to a tradition of
professional commitment by medical researchers that includes
deliberate self-infection with the bacteria and viruses that cause
stomach ulcers, yellow fever, relapsing fever, and venereal diseases,
as well as the consumption of radioactive dyes and self-
catheterization of the heart.14 Some experiments in this vein led to
Nobel Prizes, but the ethics of self-experimentation are problematic,
may contravene the Hippocratic oath, and are assuredly at odds with
modern guidelines for good clinical practices. Although his
experimental approach was questionable, Remak clearly established
that a fungus could cause an infection, and, remarkably, he had
made this breakthrough twenty years before Louis Pasteur linked
microbes to disease in his germ theory. Remak cared very little about
scientific honors—the glittering prizes revered by most members of
the academy. He was an unusually humble scientist who refused to
take credit for his ringworm discovery, insisting, instead, that an older
colleague had made the crucial insights. Today, he is recognized as
one of the pioneers of medical mycology, which is the study of fungal
infections and their treatment.
 Fungi that cause ringworm feed in the outermost layers of the
skin, where older cells are pushed to the surface by the underlying
tissues. These cells are stuffed with fibrous keratin protein and
become embedded in a fatty matrix as they die. This structure has
been likened to a brick-and-mortar wall. It forms a shield against
dehydration from the inside and infection from the outside and is
constantly renewed as the oldest cells are shed into the environment.
Hyphae of the ringworm fungi invade this skin layer, releasing
enzymes, digesting the protein and the fat, and expanding into their
fairy rings. Hair and nails are also fashioned from keratin and can
become infected with ringworm fungi. In scalp ringworm, the fungi
dive into the hair follicles and invade the hair shafts, feeding on the
keratin until the hairs become brittle, fracture, and fall out, leaving
bare spots on the scalp.
Ringworm fungi belong to the ascomycete group, which includes
species of Penicillium that produce antibiotics, and Aspergillus that
cause the lung infection found by Owen when he dissected the
flamingo.15 Ringworm infections are dubbed with Latin names
according to the sites where they grow and other distinguishing
characteristics—tinea capitis for the scalp, tinea pedis for the foot,
tinea unguium for the toenails, and so on. Other skin infections come
under the umbrella of tinea corporis, which includes a mycosis that
spreads between young wrestlers and judo students that has been
given the splendid name tinea corporis gladiatorum.16 Tinea corporis
gladiatorum! If dermatologists pursued more of this kind of creative
nomenclature, their patients might feel a modest elevation upon their
diagnoses: “athlete’s foot” is a bit deflating, so, how about tinea
pedis-athletarum, -gymnasticorum, or -victorum? Just an idea.
Ringworm infections are the commonest type of mycoses, affecting
one billion or more of us at any time.17 Ringworm is an affliction of
childhood, and the number of cases falls abruptly after puberty. This
suggests that the fungi are rebuffed by the hormonal hurricane that
alters the chemistry of the skin secretions, reconditions the immune
system, and leaves most of us feeling quite unsettled for a while.
Ringworm infections remain prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, where a
Kenyan study found that 81 percent of children from an “informal
settlement,” or slum, in Nairobi suffered from tinea capitis—the scalp
infection.18 A separate survey in rural Nigeria showed that almost half
of the children in the ethnic Nok community were infected.19 The
common name for tinea capitis used by the Nok is translated as
“spider web,” which refers to the belief that spiders urinate on the
heads of children, lay their eggs, and create the ringworm patterns of
concentric rings when they spin their webs. At the time of the study,
published in 2016, the local barber was shaving the heads of the
children with the worst cases of ringworm. He sterilized his clippers
between shearings by dousing the blades with denatured alcohol and
igniting them with a cigarette lighter.
Poverty and poor hygiene have always been a magnet for
ringworm infections, and they were very widespread in Europe when
Robert Remak showed that they were caused by fungi. Compared
with the early treatments recommended by Western experts, the
Nigerian barber’s remedy seems very gentle. Complete hair removal
was a common treatment, which involved plastering the scalp with
molten tar or resin. This paste was left to harden into a solid cap that
was ripped away, carrying infected and uninfected hairs as well as
skin tissue and, I imagine, leaving the poor child blinking in horror
and traumatized for life.20 This seems to have been a popular remedy
in the nineteenth century. Doses of thallium acetate, or rat poison,
produced the same effect, although the drawback of prescribing an
oral medication whose “therapeutic dose is so near the limit of the
lethal dose” could not be ignored when children started dying.21
Ringworm spreads from person to person via infected skin cells,
and outbreaks became common during the industrial revolution
among children living in the “rookeries” or slums of London and other
overcrowded cities. Orphanages and boarding schools—think Nicholas
Nickleby—were breeding grounds for fungi, and then, in the 1890s,
there was a medical breakthrough in the treatment of ringworm: X-
ray epilation. Hair loss was observed in people treated with X-rays for
other skin conditions, so the application of the technology for
deliberate hair removal seemed an obvious step. The effectiveness of
the method was undeniable. What could possibly go wrong? The
Lancet published a letter in 1896 suggesting that gentlemen should
zap their chin hairs with X-rays for a few minutes every evening to
save the effort of shaving the next morning.22 This practice failed to
catch on, but women visited “Tricho” salons where cosmetic X-ray
machines were used for removing unwanted hair until 1929.
The danger of the procedure was evident from the fact that the
inventor of these appliances went on to have his left hand amputated
to stop the spread of cancer and experienced the loss of his right
hand to ulceration.23 But enthusiasm for curing ringworm with
radiation continued in the 1930s, when a distinguished London
radiologist wrote, “Even if, through some error in technique, an
overdose is given, the worst that can happen is an X-ray burn.”24 This
reckless attitude persisted for decades, and hundreds of thousands of
children were treated before the therapy fizzled out in the 1960s.
Radiation exposures varied, and the redirection of the beams toward
different parts of the head during a treatment session reduced the
damage to any single spot. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that
children received X-ray dosages that we reserve for the treatment of
brain tumors today, and which, tragically, may have caused brain
tumors in an untold number of these patients in later life.
The frequent repetition of the word “may” in this book (and other
expressions of possibility rather than certainty) is demanded by the
science. In the ringworm X-ray story, we are not sure that the
treatment resulted in the development of cancer in adulthood. It is
very difficult to tie individual cases of cancer to a particular exposure
to radiation, and so we pursue epidemiological studies in which we
gather information on as many ringworm patients as possible and see
what happened to them in later life. If there is a clear spike in brain
tumors in these patients compared with untreated controls, we edge
closer to scientific certainty. If the number of cancer cases is no
greater, or not much greater, than the background, we are left with
an unresolved problem. Some of the studies on ringworm patients
suggest that there is a link between the use of radiation and cancer,
while others do not.25 It is possible that we will never know for sure.
Besides the fear of a cancer diagnosis, some Israeli girls treated with
X-rays suffered from permanent hair loss that left them with lifelong
cosmetic and psychiatric challenges.26 However we look at it, this
ringworm treatment was a low point in medical mycology.
Most ringworm fungi provoke a relatively mild response from the
immune system, and some children with disfiguring skin infections
are spared from intense itching and other symptoms of inflammation.
This blessing is a feature of the limitation of fungal growth to the
layers of dead skin cells and separation from the deeper tissues
patrolled by the active cells of the immune system. The ringworm
fungi also use various tricks to camouflage themselves while they
feed on the skin. One of these mechanisms allows the fungus to
conceal molecules on the surface of its hyphal filaments that
otherwise serve as alarm bells for the immune defenses. This
invisibility cloak evolved over tens of millions of years, as soil fungi
adapted themselves for growing on the skin of different kinds of
animals. Relatives of the human ringworm fungi colonize other
mammals without causing any obvious harm, but they can damage
our skin if they are transferred from farm animals or pets. Infections
that come from other animals are called zoonoses, and they are a
good reason for avoiding contact with hedgehogs. Intimacy with
hedgehogs does not concern most of us, but cases of ringworm
infections among lovers of these spiny animals are surprisingly
common. Dogs and cats are more common sources of human
ringworm, and the ubiquity of these pets makes these zoonotic
infections inevitable.27 Islamic prohibitions against keeping dogs in
the home seem entirely reasonable from a mycological viewpoint.
Fortunately, the development of antifungal medicines means that
ringworm infections can be cured today without recourse to violent
epilation, rat poison, or X-rays. Griseofulvin was discovered in the
1930s, and its use for treating ringworm began in the 1950s. It is
made naturally by a species of Penicillium that causes blue mold on
harvested apples and is a close relative of the fungi that produce the
penicillin antibiotics. Griseofulvin is taken as an oral medication and
kills the ringworm fungi from the inside out, making its way to the
skin surface where it infiltrates the hair follicles and destroys the
hyphae from the bottom of the hair shafts toward the tips. It works
by disrupting the division of nuclei inside the hyphae. Other
antifungal drugs effective against ringworm include terbinafine and
azole antifungals that disrupt fungal membranes. Apple cider vinegar,
tea tree oil, and raw honey are some of the natural products
promoted as alternative treatments for ringworm. (We look at
antifungal drugs in more detail in chapter 4.)

DANDRUFF
Outbreaks of scalp ringworm in children are uncommon in more
prosperous countries today, and the drug treatments are effective in
treating individual cases when they develop. This does not mean that
the scalp has become a microbiological desert. Far from it. It is a hive
of fungal activity throughout our lives, no matter how many times we
wash our hair. Most of the fungi that grow on the skin do so as yeasts
rather than molds, as blobs rather than webs. This is a good thing,
because yeasts stay on surfaces, whereas molds, or filamentous
fungi, are fashioned for penetrating tissues, and nothing good comes
from skin invasion by fungi. Species of Malassezia yeasts are the
dominant fungi on the scalp. They are named for a French anatomist,
Louis-Charles Malassez, who found them growing in skin flakes
scraped from patients suffering from seborrheic dermatitis.
Seborrheic dermatitis is an extreme form of dandruff, sharing many
of its characteristics with the snowiness of hair that afflicts a good
chunk of humanity to varying degrees. Both complaints involve the
multiplication of Malassezia in the sebum exuded from the sebaceous
glands. The mouths of these microscopic glands open into the hair
follicles wherever we are hairy, and directly on the skin surface in
places where we are not. Sweat glands are separate things that
release more watery secretions whose evaporation is key to
controlling body temperature.
Sebum is marvelously complicated stuff that contains a mélange of
fats and oils and is produced in varying amounts according to age
and sex—more in men than women—and serves as the dietary staple
for the yeasts that live on the skin. These fungi are so perfectly
adapted to life on the skin that they have lost the ability to produce
their own fatty acids like other organisms and draw everything they
need from the sebum. We consume fats, of course, but our ability to
manufacture fatty acids from sugars in the diet is essential for
constructing membranes and performing all kinds of other metabolic
tasks. By surrendering this almost universal biochemical capability,
the evolving yeast saved a great deal of energy and bonded itself to
the skin for the rest of forever.28 Malassezia belongs to the
basidiomycete group of fungi rather than the ascomycetes that
include the molds that cause ringworm. Fungi that form gilled
mushrooms are classified as basidiomycetes, but the closest relative
of the dandruff yeast is a fungus that causes a crop disease called
corn or maize smut. (The infected ears become filled with blackened
spores that are used as an ingredient in Mexican cooking called
huitlacoche.) Both of these fungi—dandruff yeast and corn smut—are
specialized organisms that have become completely dependent on
their hosts.
Dandruff is an inflammatory condition that develops as the yeast
works its way into the skin, feeding on the sebum and releasing
irritating compounds onto the scalp. This disturbance to the skin
chemistry alerts the immune system, which responds by mobilizing
macrophages and killer cells against the fungus. Itching and skin
flaking are symptoms of the unfolding turmoil on the scalp.
Malassezia lives on everyone, so the reason that some of us are
spared dandruff and others itch, scratch, and flake is a bit of a
mystery. What we do know, however, is how to treat it.
Early in my research career, I worked at Yale University with a
visiting scientist from the Soviet Bloc who was very careful with
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “Francis Russell, son of George and Mary Midford, was
privately baptized on the 12th, but died on the 23rd of
November, 1786.”
It is important that this entry should be placed on record, for while,
in after years, Miss Mitford speaks of herself as the only survivor of
three children, two sons having died in infancy, it has been stated in
print that “Mary Russell Mitford was their only child.” On the other
hand, although careful search has been made, no record of the
baptism or burial of a third child has been discovered in the Alresford
registers, and we can only assume, therefore, that this child must
have died at birth and on a date subsequent to that of his sister.
Sufficient for us, however, is the entry in these same registers:—
“Mary Russell, daughter of George and Mary Midford,
baptized February 29, 1788”—
the child having been born on December 16, 1787.
Of these early days we have, fortunately, a picture left by the child
herself. “A pleasant home, in truth, it was,” she writes. “A large
house in a little town of the north of Hampshire—a town, so small,
that but for an ancient market, very slenderly attended, nobody
would have dreamt of calling it anything but a village.[3] The breakfast
room, where I first possessed myself of my beloved ballads, was a
lofty and spacious apartment, literally lined with books, which, with
its Turkey carpet, its glowing fire, its sofas, and its easy chairs,
seemed, what indeed it was, a very nest of English comfort. The
windows opened on a large old-fashioned garden, full of old-
fashioned flowers, stocks, roses, honeysuckles and pinks; and that
again led into a grassy orchard, abounding with fruit-trees. What a
playground was that orchard! and what playfellows were mine!
Nancy [her maid], with her trim prettiness, my own dear father,
handsomest and cheerfullest of men, and the great Newfoundland
dog, Coe, who used to lie down at my feet, as if to invite me to
mount him, and then to prance off with his burthen, as if he enjoyed
the fun as much as we did. Most undoubtedly I was a spoilt child.
When I recollect certain passages of my thrice-happy early life, I
cannot have the slightest doubt about the matter, although it
contradicts all foregone conclusions, all nursery and schoolroom
morality, to say so. But facts are stubborn things. Spoilt I was.
Everybody spoilt me—most of all the person whose power in that
way was greatest: the dear papa himself. Not content with spoiling
me indoors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me
round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-
old feet, whilst the little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I called
my bridle (those were days of pig-tails), hung so fast, and tugged so
heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come off between my
fingers, and send his hair floating and the powder flying down his
back. That climax of mischief was the crowning joy of all. I can hear
our shouts of laughter now.”
A pretty picture this, and one to which, as she wrote of it, the tired
old woman looked back as on one of the few oases in a life which,
despite certain successes, was nothing short of a desert of
weariness and of struggle with poverty.
But apart from this boisterous love of play, the little girl early
developed a passion for reading, fostered and encouraged, no
doubt, by that “grave home-loving mother,” who “never in her life
read any book but devotion,” in whose room, indeed, it was matter
for astonished comment to find the works of Spenser.
At the age of three, little Mary showed a remarkable precocity of
intellect, and even before she had reached that early age her father
was accustomed to perch her on the breakfast-table to exhibit her
one accomplishment to admiring guests, “who admired all the more,
because, a small puny child, looking far younger than I really was,
nicely dressed, as only children generally are, and gifted with an
affluence of curls, I might have passed for the twin sister of my own
great doll.”
On such occasions she would be given one or other of the Whig
newspapers of the day—the Courier or Morning Chronicle—and, to
the delight of her father and the wonder of the guests, would prattle
forth the high-seasoned political pronouncements with which those
journals were filled.
 Following this display there was, of course, reward; not with
sweetmeats, however, “too plentiful in my case to be very greatly
cared for,” but by the reading of the “Children in the Wood” by
mother from Percy’s Reliques, “and I looked for my favourite ballad
after every performance, just as the piping bullfinch that hung in the
window looked for his lump of sugar after going through ‘God save
the King.’ The two cases were exactly parallel.”
But one day “the dear mamma” was absent and could not
administer the customary reward, with the result that papa had to
read the “Children in the Wood,” though not before he had searched
the shelves to find the, to him, unfamiliar volumes. Following which
search and labour he was easily constrained by the petted child to
hand over the book to Nancy, that she might read extracts whenever
called upon. And when Nancy, as was inevitable, waxed weary of the
“Children in the Wood,” she gradually took to reading other of the
ballads; “and as from three years old I grew to be four or five, I
learned to read them myself, and the book became the delight of my
childhood, as it is now the solace of my age.”
 Mary Russell Mitford at the age of three.
(From a Miniature.)

With a child so apt it is not surprising that we find no record of a

governess or tutor during these early years—that is, so far as
general education was concerned; but there was one item of special
education which the fond papa did insist upon, an insistence which
was the cause of much grief to and some disobedience from the
spoilt girl.
“How my father, who certainly never knew the tune of ‘God save
the King’ from that of the other national air, ‘Rule, Britannia,’ came to
take into his head so strong a fancy to make me an accomplished
musician I could never rightly understand, but that such a fancy did
possess him I found to my sorrow! From the day I was five years old,
he stuck me up to the piano, and, although teacher after teacher had
discovered that I had neither ear, nor taste, nor application, he
continued, fully bent upon my learning it.”
Nevertheless, she did not learn it and, as we shall see later, this
fixed idea of her father’s gave place to another equally futile.
Chief of her playmates at this time was William Harness, the son
of her mother’s trustee. He would be brought over from Wickham in
the morning, and after a day of romps, be taken back in his father’s
carriage late in the afternoon. Although two years the junior of Mary,
William was her constant and boon companion, and remained to be
her friend and counsellor through life, although his counsels were, at
times, very wilfully disregarded.
Mutually genial of temperament, they sympathized with each
other’s tastes and pursuits, particularly as these related to Literature
and the Drama. On one point only did they disagree, and its subject
was “dear papa.” By a sort of intuition the boy must have, even in
those early days, come to regard the handsome, bluff, genial, loud-
voiced surgeon with something akin to suspicion, a suspicion which
was maintained and fully justified in the years to come.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Then also Dean of Exeter and, subsequently, Bishop of that
Diocese.
[2] Derived from the situation of the Castle keep, which lies
between the fords of the river Wansbeck, Northumberland.
[3] Many years afterwards, when appointed to the See of
Winchester, the late Bishop Thorold alluded to it as one of a
number of Town-Villages which he said he found so peculiarly
distinctive a feature of Hampshire.
 CHAPTER II

LYME REGIS AND TRAGEDY’S SHADOW

The picture, given us by Miss Mitford herself, of those early days in

the Hampshire home, is one from the contemplation of which we are
loth to drag ourselves.
Again and again in her Recollections we note how the memory
was drawn upon to conjure up some pleasant scene from the past.
Of the town itself her vision is of “a picturesque country church with
yews and lindens on one side, and beyond, a down as smooth as
velvet, dotted with rich islands of coppice, hazel, woodbine,
hawthorn and holly reaching up into the young oaks, and
overhanging flowery patches of primroses, wood-sorrel, wild
hyacinths, and wild strawberries. On the side opposite the church in
a hollow fringed with alders and bulrushes, gleamed the bright clear
lakelet, radiant with swans and water-lilies, which the simple
townsfolk were content to call the Great Pond.”
Fortunately for us the hand of Time has touched this old town
gently. It is true the picturesque country church has, by sheer force
of decay begotten of a hoary antiquity, given place to one not less
picturesque on the old site; but the peaceful aspect of the streets
and inns remains, together with that commodious house in the Broad
Street which, excepting one slight internal alteration, differs in
nothing from the house which Miss Mitford knew in her childhood,
the place of her birth.
With steep-pitched roof and painted front, its old dormer-windows
look out with a certain grave dignity befitting the windows of a house
which enshrines such a tender memory, on the town “through whose
streets streamed Cavaliers and Roundheads after the battle of
Cheriton,” on the downs where, a full hundred and twenty years ago,
the little mistress was wont fearlessly to ride on her father’s favourite
blood-mare, seated on a specially-contrived pad and enclosed so
fondly by that same father’s strong and loving arm.
Specially privileged and greatly esteeming the privilege, we have
wandered through the rooms of this house; seen the breakfast room
round which were ranged the books of Grandpa Russell’s library;
seen the curiously contrived sash-window—the like of which we
have never seen in any house before or since—fashioned so
cunningly that its entire height slides upward into a recess quite out
of sight; stepped through the opening thus made on to the flagged
pathway leading by quaint outbuildings and stable to the garden and
orchard beyond, where, as we have already noted, took place those
dashing rides on a human mount, with a powdered, beribboned pig-
tail in lieu of reins.
Small wonder is it that we looked on these things with something
akin to reverence, and certainly with pity in our heart as we recalled
how shamefully those idyllic days were to end.
With a strong preference for country sports and occupations, with
a gay and careless temper which all the professional etiquette of the
world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a doctor of
medicine, and with that insidious canker, the love of gambling, slowly
devouring any manliness he may have possessed, Dr. Mitford
gradually frittered away the whole of his wife’s fortune, save a matter
of £3,500 in the funds, which, being in the hands of trustees, was
beyond his reach. Generous to a degree, and with a blind confidence
and belief in her husband’s affection, Mrs. Mitford would not permit
any part of her property to be settled on herself, and was therefore,
to some extent, to blame for the catastrophe which followed.
Thus, in a few short years of married life—at the most nine—we
find this professional man forced to sell furniture and portions of his
library in order to meet current expenses and ease the clamours of
his creditors; forced, indeed, from very shame, to quit the self-
contained and therefore intolerant town where bitter tongues were
wagging and scornful fingers pointing, and to take up a residence in
a distant seaside town, where, if he ever hoped to retrench and
reform, and had he but given the matter a moment’s consideration,
he was scarcely likely to achieve his object.
It was to Lyme Regis they went—this unduly optimistic, noisy,
sportsman-practitioner, with his uncomplaining still trustful wife and
their six-year-old daughter, wide-eyed and wondering why this
sudden flight. The true import of this removal was not to be hidden
from this remarkably intuitive child. “In that old, historical town,” she
writes in one of her reminiscent moods, “that old town so finely
placed on the very line where Dorsetshire and Devonshire meet, I
spent the eventful year when the careless happiness of childhood
vanished, and the troubles of the world first dimly dawned upon my
heart—felt in its effects rather than known—felt in its chilling gloom,
as we feel the shadow of a cloud that passes over the sun on an
April day.” Strangely-sad words these, expressing the thoughts of a
child at an age when, not strong enough to help and too young to be
confided in, it can do nothing but mark the change, questioning the
mother’s furtive tear while, rendered more sensitive by reason of its
own impotence, it shudders in the cold atmosphere of vague yet ill-
concealed suspicion and mistrust.
Yet, mark the improvidence of this unstable man; the house he
took in Lyme Regis was, “as commonly happens to people whose
fortunes are declining, far more splendid than that we had inhabited,
indeed the very best in the town.”
The house still stands with its “great extent of frontage, terminating
by large gates surmounted by spread eagles.” It is now known as
“The Retreat,” and is in the Broad Street of Lyme, proudly pointed to
by the inhabitants as the house once rented by the great Lord
Chatham for the benefit of his son’s—William Pitt’s—health, and,
twenty years later, by the Mitford family.
Lyme Regis is the embodiment of much that is interesting,
historically and politically, but particularly to us by reason of its
literary associations. Of “The Retreat” we have, fortunately, a
description written by Miss Mitford herself.
 “An old stone porch, with benches on either side, projected from
the centre, covered as was the whole front of the house, with tall,
spreading, wide-leaved myrtle, abounding in blossom, with moss-
roses, jessamine, and passion-flowers. Behind the building,
extended round a paved quadrangle, was the drawing-room, a
splendid apartment, looking upon a little lawn surrounded by choice
evergreens, the bay, the cedar and the arbutus, and terminated by
an old-fashioned greenhouse and a filbert-tree walk. In the steep
declivity of the central garden was a grotto, over-arching a cool,
sparkling spring, whilst the slopes on either side were carpeted with
strawberries and dotted with fruit trees. One drooping medlar,
beneath whose branches I have often hidden, I remember well.”
This great house, with its large and lofty rooms, its noble oaken
staircases, its marble hall, long galleries and corridors, was scarcely
the house which a man anxious to mark time in an unpretentious
fashion was likely to choose. Nor, had he stopped for one moment to
consider, would he have chosen Lyme Regis as a retreat, for it was
then practically at the height of its fashionable prosperity, with its gay
Assembly Rooms, the resort of those on whom Bath and
Brighthelmstone were beginning to pall, and who were henceforth to
divide their patronage between this Dorsetshire rendezvous and that
other, just awakened, resort still further westward round the coast
and destined, in the slow course of a century, to become the
imperiously aristocratic Torquay.
No, indeed! this was no move the wisdom of which was calculated
to inspire in the breast of Harness, the trustee, any restoration of
confidence, for those long galleries and corridors were, quite
naturally, “echoing from morning to night with gay visitors, cousins
from the North, and the ever-shifting company of the watering-place.”
It was a strange place wherein a laughter-loving child should be
sad. “Yet sad I was,” she says. “Nobody told me, but I felt, I knew, I
had an interior conviction, for which I could not have accounted, that,
in the midst of all this natural beauty and apparent happiness, in
spite of the company, in spite of the gaiety, something was wrong. It
was such a foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer
sink whilst the weather is still bright and clear.”
 How pitiful it all seems! how strangely pathetic when, side by side
with that description of the insistent shadow, we set the written
indictment of him who was the cause of all the trouble—pathetic
because, though an indictment, it is done so gently and breathes the
very spirit of forgiveness.
“Then ... he attempted to increase his resources by the aid of
cards, (he was, unluckily, one of the finest whist-players in England),
or by that other terrible gambling, which assumes so many forms,
and bears so many names, but which even when called by its milder
term of Speculation, is that terrible thing gambling still; whatever
might be the manner of the loss—or whether, as afterwards
happened, his own large-hearted hospitality and too-confiding
temper were alone to blame—for the detail was never known to me,
nor do I think it was known to my mother; he did not tell and we
could not ask. How often, in after-life, has that sanguine spirit, which
clung to him to his last hour, made me tremble and shiver.”
Herein, perhaps, we may divine the reason for the otherwise
incomprehensible move from Alresford, where the cost of living
would be cheap[4] as compared with the high prices obtaining at
fashionable Lyme! Nevertheless, although the influence of the
brooding shadow was insistent, these days at Lyme Regis were not
without their excitement and pleasures.
“One incident that occurred there—a frightful danger—a
providential escape—I shall never forget,” says Miss Mitford in her
Recollections.
A ball at the Rooms was about to take place, and a party of
sixteen or more persons dressed for it had assembled in the Mitford
dining-room for dessert, when suddenly the heavy plaster
ornamentation of the ceiling crashed down in large masses upon the
folk seated beneath. Fortunately the only damage was to the flowers
and feathers of the ladies, the crystal and china, and the fruits and
wines of the dessert, together with a few scratches on the bald head
of a venerable clergyman.
“I, myself,” she continues, “caught instantly in my father’s arms, by
whose side I was standing, had scarcely even time to be frightened,
although after the danger was over, our fair visitors of course began
to scream.”
But it was in the planning and carrying out of excursions in the
neighbourhood that Dr. Mitford showed to greater advantage, giving
full play to those characteristics which, as opposed to his general
selfishness, endeared him then and always to children. Hand in hand
with his little daughter, vivacious and inquiring, the two would sally
forth in quest of glittering spars and ores, of curious shells and
seaweeds and of the fossils which abounded in the Bay, the
collection to be finally carried home and laid out in a certain dark
panelled chamber which, after the book-room, was the most
favoured spot in all the house to the little girl.
Sometimes these excursions would take them towards
Charmouth, at others to the Pinny cliffs, where, “about a mile and a
half from the town, an old landslip had deposited a farm-house, with
its outbuildings, its garden, and its orchard, tossed half-way down
amongst the rocks, contrasting so strangely its rich and blossoming
vegetation, its look of home and comfort, with the dark rugged
masses above, below and around.”
At other times they would pace together that quaint old pier, the
Cob, or ascend the hill to Up-Lyme, whence they might watch the
waves swirling in sheets of green and spumey white in the Bay
below.
Very happy, on such occasions, was the child, although the
indefinable shadow dogged her, now vague, now portentous.
At last, and little more than a twelvemonth after their removal to
Lyme, there was a hurried flitting, following short and stormy
interviews with landlords, lawyers and others.
One fateful night “two or three large chests were carried away
through the garden by George and another old servant.” Everything
was to be sold so that everybody might be paid. Save a few special
favourites among the books, the library was left for disposal by
auction, and a day or two after, Mrs. Mitford and the child, with Mrs.
Mosse, the housekeeper and a maid-servant, left Lyme and its
shadow for London and a shadow of more sinister bearing.
Dr. Mitford had gone before, leaving the little party to travel post in
a hack chaise. The journey was full of discomfort to the distressed
women. At Dorchester, where they had hoped to stay the night, they
found the town so full of soldiers, breaking camp, that there was no
accommodation for them, nor was there chaise or horses wherewith
to pursue the journey. Finally, after searching all over the place, they
were able to obtain a lift in a rough tilted cart without springs which
bumped and jolted them over eight rough miles to a small place
whence they might hope to proceed in the morning.
“It was my mother’s first touch of poverty; it seemed like a final
parting from all the elegances and all the accommodations to which
she had been used. I never shall forget her heart-broken look when
she took her little girl upon her lap in that jolting caravan, nor how the
tears stood in her eyes when we were turned altogether into our
miserable bed-room when we reached the roadside ale-house where
we were to pass the night, and found ourselves, instead of the tea
we so much needed, condemned to sup on stale bread and cheese.”
The next day they resumed their journey, and at length reached a
dingy comfortless lodging on the Surrey side of Blackfriars Bridge,
where, with the cause of all the trouble, they found a refuge from
pressing creditors within the rules of the King’s Bench. Here, like a
certain historic figure whose exploits were to be inimitably recorded
later, Dr. Mitford waited for something to turn up, beguiling the time
by visits to Guy’s Hospital, where his friend and fellow-pupil, Dr.
Babington, was one of the physicians, and by performing odd jobs
for, and being generally useful to the notorious “Dr. Graham”—a
famous quack who throve amazingly at the expense of a gullible and
doubtless sensually-minded public.[5]
With her fortune gone and with only the tattered but eloquent
remnants of respectability left to her, can we wonder that the
educated and refined daughter of an eminent divine should wear a
heart-broken look and weep bitter tears? Her spirit was broken, and
even Hope seemed to have deserted her!
 FOOTNOTES:
[4] The only two entries in the rate-books of Alresford, relating to
payments made by “George Mitford—Surgeon,” are, under an
assessment at 9d. in the pound, made in 1787—7s.; and, under
an assessment at 4½d. in the pound, made in 1790—5s.
[5] Dr. Graham’s “Celestial Bed” for sterile couples is numbered
among the astounding frauds of the early nineteenth century. To
his “Temple”—first in the Adelphi and later, as he grew wealthy
and more daring, to Schomberg House in Pall Mall—there
thronged a heterogeneous mass of people, some taking him and
his nostrums seriously, while others—the bulk, it is suggested—
paid large sums for admission to view Emma Lyon, afterwards
Lady Hamilton, pose, in scant drapery, as the Goddess of
Hygiene. Not the least of this charlatan’s astounding
achievements are his obscene and blasphemous pamphlets on
the most delicate subjects, which he circulated broadcast among
the class to which he knew they would appeal.
 CHAPTER III

READING AND SCHOOL DAYS AT CHELSEA

Dr. Mitford’s spirit was a sanguine one; he could not believe that
Dame Fortune intended to frown on him and his for ever. With much
to commend it in a general way, the possession of such a spirit may
yet be a menace, a positive danger. To a man of Dr. Mitford’s
character it was a danger. It led him into the rashest of speculations;
it launched him upon the wildest of wild schemes and left him, nearly
always, a loser.
On one occasion, however, Fortune smiled on him in so dramatic
a fashion that thereafter his belief in himself could never be shaken.
It happened some long time after the family had been settled in
the dingy London apartments and, in accordance with his usual
practice, the Doctor had taken his little daughter to walk about
London—a never-failing source of delight to her, both then and in
later life.
“One day”—her own description of the event is so expressive and
circumstantial—“he took me into a not very tempting-looking place,
which was, as I speedily found, a lottery-office. It was my birthday,
and I was ten years old. An Irish lottery was upon the point of being
drawn, and he desired me to choose one out of several bits of
printed paper (I did not then know their significance) that lay upon
the counter.
“‘Choose which number you like best,’ said the dear papa, ‘and
that shall be your birthday present.’
“I immediately selected one, and put it into his hand; No. 2,224.
 “‘Ah!’ said my father, examining it, ‘you must choose again. I want
to buy a whole ticket; and this is only a quarter. Choose again, my
pet.’
“‘No, dear papa, I like this one best.’
“‘Here is the next number,’ interposed the lottery-office keeper,
‘No. 2,223.’
“‘Ay,’ said my father, ‘that will do just as well. Will it not, Mary?
We’ll take that.’
“‘No!’ returned I obstinately; ‘that won’t do. This is my birthday, you
know, papa, and I am ten years old. Cast up my number, and you’ll
find that makes ten. The other is only nine.’
“My father, superstitious like all speculators, struck with my
pertinacity and with the reason I gave, which he liked none the less
because the ground of preference was tolerably unreasonable,
resisted the attempt of the office-keeper to tempt me by different
tickets, and we had nearly left the shop without a purchase, when
the clerk, who had been examining different desks and drawers, said
to his principal:—
“‘I think, sir, the matter may be managed if the gentleman does not
mind paying a few shillings more. That ticket, 2,224, only came
yesterday, and we have still all the shares: one half, one quarter, one
eighth, two sixteenths. It will be just the same if the young lady is set
upon it.’
“The young lady was set upon it, and the shares were purchased.
“‘The whole affair was a secret between us, and my father,
whenever he got me to himself, talked over our future twenty
thousand pounds—just like Alnaschar over his basket of eggs.
“Meanwhile time passed on, and one Sunday morning a face that I
had forgotten, but my father had not, made its appearance. It was
the clerk of the lottery-office. An express had just arrived from
Dublin, announcing that No. 2,224 had been drawn a prize of twenty
thousand pounds, and he had hastened to communicate the good
news.”
 Twenty thousand pounds! Dame Fortune was indeed rewarding
the optimist. Dr. Mitford was nothing if not magnanimous, and
although he had presented the lottery ticket as a birthday present to
his daughter, and although it was due to her persistence only that the
winning number, 2,224, had been chosen, he at once claimed the
success as his own, and, when informing his friends, added that he
should settle the whole amount on his daughter.
No trace of any such settlement can be discovered; if it was made
it was speedily annulled and in the course of a very few years it had
been all squandered in the Doctor’s own reckless fashion.
“Ah, me!” reflects Miss Mitford. “In less than twenty years what
was left of the produce of the ticket so strangely chosen? What?
except a Wedgwood dinner-service that my father had made to
commemorate the event with the Irish harp within the border on one
side, and his family crest on the other!”
The infinite possibilities of twenty thousand pounds were not lost
on the Doctor. Forthwith he moved with his wife, child and few
belongings to Reading, then a fairly prosperous and eminently
respectable town, swarming “with single ladies of that despised
denomination which is commonly known by the title of old maids.”
At the period of which we are now writing its commerce was
practically confined to trading in the products of the rural districts
surrounding it—principally in malt, corn and flour. Being on the direct
coach-road from London to the West of England, it was, naturally, a
great and important centre for the carrying trade, as witness whereof
the many quaint old inns still standing. An air of prosperity pervaded
the streets, for the ancient borough was just beginning to rouse itself
from the lethargy into which it had drifted when its staple trade, the
manufacture of cloth, dwindled and died scarcely a century before.
“Clean, airy, orderly and affluent; well paved, well lighted, well
watched; abounding in wide and spacious streets, filled with
excellent shops and handsome houses,” is Miss Mitford’s description
of it, and she might have added that it was once again comporting
itself in the grand manner as was proper to a town whose origin is
lost in the mists of antiquity, but whose records, from the twelfth
century at least, are records of great doings of both Church and
State.
In Miss Mitford’s day there were still many picturesque examples
of fifteenth-century domestic architecture bordering the streets, while
the ruined magnificence of the Great Abbey, with its regal tomb of
Henry I before the High Altar, lent it a touch of dignity the like of
which few other provincial towns could assume.
The move from London to Reading took place in 1797, and the
house they inhabited was a new and handsome red-brick structure
on the London Road, fortunately still standing, and now known as
“Kendrick View.” Here, with his phaeton, his spaniels and
greyhounds, Dr. Mitford proceeded to enjoy himself with, apparently,
no regard whatever for the future. The swarms of old maids excelled
in arranging card-parties to which, by inviting the wives, they
managed to secure the presence and company of the husbands. At
these parties the Doctor was an ever-welcome guest, for, as we
have already noted, he was one of the finest whist-players of his
time. Everything he did was performed on a lavish scale. His
greyhounds, for instance, were the best that money could procure—
no coursing meeting either in the neighbourhood or the country for
many miles round was considered complete unless the Mitford
kennel was represented, nor, as the Doctor was impatient of defeat,
did he consider the meeting a success unless the Mitford kennel
carried all before it.
Meanwhile, and when not engaged in the mild excitements of
cribbage and quadrille, Mrs. Mitford paced the garden at the rear of
the house, “in contented, or at least uncomplaining, solitude,” for
even now, she could never be certain whether, at any moment, the
hazardous life her husband was leading might not plunge them once
again into a miserable poverty; “a complaining woman
uncomplaining.”
Their daughter’s education now became a matter of moment, for
she was in her eleventh year. Accordingly, she was entered as a
boarder at the school kept by M. St. Quintin, a French émigré, at 22,
Hans Place, Sloane Street, then almost surrounded by fields, and
even now, although much altered, a pleasant enough situation.

“Kendrick View,” Reading, where the Mitfords

lived, 1797-1805
M. St. Quintin and his wife enjoyed a reputation of no ordinary
character, and before venturing on the Hans Place establishment
had built up a good connection and secured an equally good name,
in the conduct of the Abbey School at Reading in a house adjoining
what is known to have been the Inner Gateway of the famous Abbey.
In this Abbey School—though not under the tuition of Monsieur and
Madame St. Quintin—Jane Austen received much of her education,
as did also another famous author, Mrs. Sherwood.
Their reputation in Reading was, doubtless, the deciding factor in
favour of sending Mary Mitford to them in London, and that the
decision was a happy one there can be no question.
Little Mary, from her very early years, had not enjoyed the best of
health. As is common with precocious children, she was somewhat
scrofulous; coupled with this she was further disadvantaged by being
short and fat. Nor was she pretty. Her portrait, painted when she was
three years old, while it depicts an intelligent face, shows nothing of
the beauty usual in children of that age. On the other hand, we have
it on the authority of those who knew her well, that whatever defects
of form and feature she may have suffered were amply compensated
by the winsome smile, the gentle temper, keen appreciation of life
and all it had to give, and by the silver-toned voice, all of which
endeared her to those who came under the spell of her personality.
She was essentially the child of her parents, combining the quiet
acquiescent nature of her mother with all the optimistic
characteristics of her father; and although, happily, she never gave
evidence of emulating her father in his selfishness or those other
worse attributes of character which he sometimes displayed, the fact
has to be recorded that, occasionally, here and there, among the
originals of her letters to her father is to be detected a certain
coarseness of thought and expression which go to prove that even
she was not altogether proof against the influence of this unwise
parent.
Monsieur St. Quintin’s establishment was well calculated to
interest the observant child, and of her schoolmaster and his
associates she has given us an amusing and picturesque
description.
“He had been secretary to the Comte de Moustiers, one of the last
Ambassadors, if not the very last, from Louis Seize to the Court of
St. James’s. Of course he knew many emigrants of the highest rank,
and, indeed, of all ranks; and being a lively, kind-hearted man, with a
liberal hand and a social temper, it was his delight to assemble as
many as he could of his poor countrymen and countrywomen around
his hospitable supper-table. Something wonderful and admirable it
was to see how these Dukes and Duchesses, Marshals and
Marquises, Chevaliers and Bishops, bore up under their unparalleled
reverses! How they laughed and talked, and squabbled, and flirted,
—constant to their high heels, their rouge, and their furbelows, to
their old liaisons, their polished sarcasms, their cherished rivalries!
For the most part, these noble exiles had a trifling pecuniary
dependency; some had brought with them jewels enough to sustain
them in their simple lodgings in Knightsbridge or Pentonville; to
some a faithful steward contrived to forward the produce of some
estate, too small to have been seized by the early plunderers; to
others a rich English friend would claim the privilege of returning the
kindness and hospitality of by-gone years.”
Many of them eked out a precarious living by teaching languages,
fencing, dancing and music; while some, like Monsieur St. Quintin,
were fortunate in being able to found and carry on an educational
establishment on a somewhat large scale.
Although shy and awkward, home-sick and lonely, little Mary soon
found much in the Hans Place establishment to interest and amuse
her. Like all other similar establishments, it contained an element of
exclusiveness fostered by the snobbish half-dozen great girls who,
being “only gentlemen’s daughters, had no earthly right to give
themselves airs.” These the little country girl did not take seriously
enough to give her cause for trouble. But she noticed them,
nevertheless, and watched with youthful contempt their successful
attempts to ostracize other less-favoured girls than themselves. Her
memories of such incidents are epitomized very charmingly in her
Recollections, wherein she records the pathetic story of
Mademoiselle Rose, and the triumph over her tormentors of the
neglected, snubbed and shy poor Betsy. It reads almost like a “moral
tale,” but is saved from the general mediocrity of such effusions by
its honest ring of indignation, of sweet girlish sympathy with the
suffering of her fellow-pupil and governess, and of denunciation of
the thoughtless ones.